But of the two parties, the doctor’s was much the smaller and less
efficiently
libellous.
Orwell - Burmese Days
The skirts of her ingyi curved outwards above her hips in little
panniers, according to the ancient Burmese fashion. They were like the petals of a
downward-pointing flower. She threw her cigar languidly to one of the men in the
orchestra, and then, holding out one slender arm, writhed it as though to shake the
muscles loose.
The orchestra burst into a sudden loud squalling. There were pipes like bagpipes, a
strange instrument consisting of plaques of bamboo which a man struck with a little
hammer, and in the middle there was a man surrounded by twelve tall drums of different
sizes. He reached rapidly from one to another, thumping them with the heel of his hand.
In a moment the girl began to dance. But at first it was not a dance, it was a rhythmic
nodding, posturing and twisting of the elbows, like the movements of one of those jointed
wooden figures on an old-fashioned roundabout. The way her neck and elbows rotated
was precisely like a jointed doll, and yet incredibly sinuous. Her hands, twisting like
snakeheads with the fingers close together, could he back until they were almost along
her forearms. By degrees her movements quickened. She began to leap from side to side,
flinging herself down in a kind of curtsy and springing up again with extraordinary
agility, in spite of the long longyi that imprisoned her feet. Then she danced in a
grotesque posture as though sitting down, knees bent, body leaned forward, with her arms
extended and writhing, her head also moving to the beat of the drums. The music
quickened to a climax. The girl rose upright and whirled round as swiftly as a top, the
pannier of her ingyi flying out about her like the petals of a snowdrop. Then the music
stopped as abruptly as it had begun, and the girl sank again into a curtsy, amid raucous
shouting from the audience.
Elizabeth watched the dance with a mixture of amazement, boredom and something
approaching horror. She had sipped her drink and found that it tasted like hair oil. On a
mat by her feet three Burmese girls lay fast asleep with their heads on the same pillow,
their small oval faces side by side like the faces of kittens. Under cover of the music
Flory was speaking in a low voice into Elizabeth’s ear commenting on the dance.
‘I knew this would interest you; that’s why I brought you here. You’ve read books and
been in civilized places, you’re not like the rest of us miserable savages here. Don’t you
think this is worth watching, in its queer way? Just look at that girl’s movements — look
at that strange, bent-forward pose like a marionette, and the way her arms twist from the
elbow like a cobra rising to strike. It’s grotesque, it’s even ugly, with a sort of wilful
ugliness. And there’s something sinister in it too. There’s a touch of the diabolical in all
Mongols. And yet when you look closely, what art, what centuries of culture you can see
behind it! Every movement that girl makes has been studied and handed down through
innumerable generations. Whenever you look closely at the art of these Eastern peoples
you can see that — a civilization stretching back and back, practically the same, into times
when we were dressed in woad. In some way that I can’t define to you, the whole life and
spirit of Burma is summed up in the way that girl twists her arms. When you see her you
can see the rice fields, the villages under the teak trees, the pagodas, the priests in their
yellow robes, the buffaloes swimming the rivers in the early morning, Thibaw’s palace —
His voice stopped abruptly as the music stopped. There were certain things, and a pwe-
dance was one of them, that pricked him to talk discursively and incautiously; but now he
realized that he had only been talking like a character in a novel, and not a very good
novel. He looked away. Elizabeth had listened to him with a chill of discomfort. What
WAS the man talking about? was her first thought. Moreover, she had caught the hated
word Art more than once. For the first time she remembered that Flory was a total
stranger and that it had been unwise to come out with him alone. She looked round her, at
the sea of dark faces and the lurid glare of the lamps; the strangeness of the scene almost
frightened her. What was she doing in this place? Surely it was not right to be sitting
among the black people like this, almost touching them, in the scent of their garlic and
their sweat? Why was she not back at the Club with the other white people? Why had he
brought her here, among this horde of natives, to watch this hideous and savage
spectacle?
The music struck up, and the pwe girl began dancing again. Her face was powdered so
thickly that it gleamed in the lamplight like a chalk mask with live eyes behind it. With
that dead-white oval face and those wooden gestures she was monstrous, like a demon.
The music changed its tempo, and the girl began to sing in a brassy voice. It was a song
with a swift trochaic rhythm, gay yet fierce. The crowd took it up, a hundred voices
chanting the harsh syllables in unison. Still in that strange bent posture the girl turned
round and danced with her buttocks protruded towards the audience. Her silk longyi
gleamed like metal. With hands and elbows still rotating she wagged her posterior from
side to side. Then — astonishing feat, quite visible through the longyi — she began to
wriggle her two buttocks independently in time with the music.
There was a shout of applause from the audience. The three girls asleep on the mat woke
up at the same moment and began clapping their hands wildly. A clerk shouted nasally
‘Bravo! Bravo! ’ in English for the Europeans’ benefit. But U Po Kyin frowned and
waved his hand. He knew all about European women. Elizabeth, however, had already
stood up.
‘I’m going. It’s time we were back,’ she said abruptly. She was looking away, but Flory
could see that her face was pink.
He stood up beside her, dismayed. ‘But, I say! Couldn’t you stay a few minutes longer? I
know it’s late, but — they brought this girl on two hours before she was due, in our
honour. Just a few minutes? ’
‘I can’t help it, I ought to have been back ages ago. I don’t know WHAT my uncle and
aunt will be thinking. ’
She began at once to pick her way through the crowd, and he followed her, with not even
time to thank the pwe people for their trouble. The Burmans made way with a sulky air.
How like these English people, to upset everything by sending for the best dancer and
then go away almost before she had started! There was a fearful row as soon as Flory and
Elizabeth had gone, the pwe girl refusing to go on with her dance and the audience
demanding that she should continue. However, peace was restored when two clowns
hurried on to the stage and began letting off crackers and making obscene jokes.
Flory followed the girl abjectly up the road. She was walking quickly, her head turned
away, and for some moments she would not speak. What a thing to happen, when they
had been getting on so well together! He kept trying to apologize.
‘I’m so sorry! I’d no idea you’d mind — ’
‘It’s nothing. What is there to be sorry about? I only said it was time to go back, that’s
all. ’
‘I ought to have thought. One gets not to notice that kind of thing in this country. These
people’s sense of decency isn’t the same as ours — it’s stricter in some ways — but — ’
‘It’s not that! It’s not that! ’ she exclaimed quite angrily.
He saw that he was only making it worse. They walked on in silence, he behind. He was
miserable. What a bloody fool he had been! And yet all the while he had no inkling of the
real reason why she was angry with him. It was not the pwe girl’s behaviour, in itself,
that had offended her; it had only brought things to a head. But the whole expedition —
the very notion of WANTING to rub shoulders with all those smelly natives — had
impressed her badly. She was perfectly certain that that was not how white men ought to
behave. And that extraordinary rambling speech that he had begun, with all those long
words — almost, she thought bitterly, as though he were quoting poetry! It was how those
beastly artists that you met sometimes in Paris used to talk. She had thought him a manly
man till this evening. Then her mind went back to the morning’s adventure, and how he
had faced the buffalo barehanded, and some of her anger evaporated. By the time they
reached the Club gate she felt inclined to forgive him. Flory had by now plucked up
courage to speak again. He stopped, and she stopped too, in a patch where the boughs let
through some starlight and he could see her face dimly.
‘I say. I say, I do hope you’re not really angry about this? ’
‘No, of course I’m not. I told you I wasn’t. ’
‘I oughtn’t to have taken you there. Please forgive me. Do you know, I don’t think I’d tell
the others where you’ve been. Perhaps it would be better to say you’ve just been out for a
stroll, out in the garden — something like that. They might think it queer, a white girl
going to a pwe. I don’t think I’d tell them. ’
‘Oh, of course I won’t! ’ she agreed with a wannness that surprised him. After that he
knew that he was forgiven. But what it was that he was forgiven, he had not yet grasped.
They went into the Club separately, by tacit consent. The expedition had been a failure,
decidedly. There was a gala air about the Club lounge tonight. The entire European
community were waiting to greet Elizabeth, and the butler and the six chokras, in their
best starched white suits, were drawn up on either side of the door, smiling and
salaaming. When the Europeans had finished their greetings the butler came forward with
a vast garland of flowers that the servants had prepared for the ‘missiesahib’. Mr
Macgregor made a very humorous speech of welcome, introducing everybody. He
introduced Maxwell as ‘our local arboreal specialist’, Westfield as ‘the guardian of law
and order and — ah — terror of the local banditti’, and so on and so forth. There was much
laughter. The sight of a pretty girl’s face had put everyone in such a good humour that
they could even enjoy Mr Macgregor’ s speech — which, to tell the truth, he had spent
most of the evening in preparing.
At the first possible moment Ellis, with a sly air, took Flory and Westfield by the arm and
drew them away into the card-room. He was in a much better mood than usual. He
pinched Flory’s arm with his small, hard fingers, painfully but quite amiably.
‘Well, my lad, everyone’s been looking for you. Where have you been all this time? ’
‘Oh, only for a stroll. ’
‘For a stroll! And who with? ’
‘With Miss Lackersteen. ’
‘I knew it! So YOU’RE the bloody fool who’s fallen into the trap, are you? YOU
swallowed the bait before anyone else had time to look at it. I thought you were too old a
bird for that, by God I did! ’
‘What do you mean? ’
‘Mean! Look at him pretending he doesn’t know what I mean! Why, I mean that Ma
Lackersteen’s marked you down for her beloved nephew-in-law, of course. That is, if you
aren’t bloody careful. Eh, Westfield? ’
‘Quite right, ol’ boy. Eligible young bachelor. Marriage halter and all that. They’ve got
their eye on him. ’
‘I don’t know where you’re getting this idea from. The girl’s hardly been here twenty-
four hours. ’
‘Long enough for you to take her up the garden path, anyway. You watch your step. Tom
Lackersteen may be a drunken sot, but he’s not such a bloody fool that he wants a niece
hanging round his neck for the rest of his life. And of course SHE knows which side her
bread’s buttered. So you take care and don’t go putting your head into the noose. ’
‘Damn it, you’ve no right to talk about people like that. After all, the girl’s only a kid — ’
‘My dear old ass’ — Ellis, almost affectionate now that he had a new subject for scandal,
took Flory by the coat lapel — ‘my dear, dear old ass, don’t you go filling yourself up with
moonshine. You think that girl’s easy fruit: she’s not. These girls out from home are all
the same. “Anything in trousers but nothing this side the altar” — that’s their motto, every
one of them. Why do you think the girl’s come out here? ’
‘Why? I don’t know. Because she wanted to, I suppose. ’
‘My good fool! She come out to lay her claws into a husband, of course. As if it wasn’t
well known! When a girl’s failed everywhere else she tries India, where every man’s
pining for the sight of a white woman. The Indian marriage-market, they call it. Meat
market it ought to be. Shiploads of ‘em coming out every year like carcasses of frozen
mutton, to be pawed over by nasty old bachelors like you. Cold storage. Juicy joints
straight from the ice. ’
‘You do say some repulsive things. ’
‘Best pasture-fed English meat,’ said Ellis with a pleased air. ‘Fresh consignments.
Warranted prime condition. ’
He went through a pantomime of examining a joint of meat, with goatish sniffs. This joke
was likely to last Ellis a long time; his jokes usually did; and there was nothing that gave
him quite so keen a pleasure as dragging a woman’s name through mud.
Flory did not see much more of Elizabeth that evening. Everyone was in the lounge
together, and there was the silly clattering chatter about nothing that there is on these
occasions. Flory could never keep up that kind of conversation for long. But as for
Elizabeth, the civilized atmosphere of the Club, with the white faces all round her and the
friendly look of the illustrated papers and the ‘Bonzo’ pictures, reassured her after that
doubtful interlude at the pwe.
When the Lackersteens left the Club at nine, it was not Flory but Mr Macgregor who
walked home with them, ambling beside Elizabeth like some friendly saurian monster,
among the faint crooked shadows of the gold mohur stems. The Prome anecdote, and
many another, found a new home. Any newcomer to Kyauktada was apt to come in for
rather a large share of Mr Macgregor’ s conversation, for the others looked on him as an
unparalleled bore, and it was a tradition at the Club to interrupt his stories. But Elizabeth
was by nature a good listener. Mr Macgregor thought he had seldom met so intelligent a
girl.
Flory stayed a little longer at the Club, drinking with the others. There was much smutty
talk about Elizabeth. The quarrel about Dr Veraswami’s election had been shelved for the
time being. Also, the notice that Ellis had put up on the previous evening had been taken
down. Mr Macgregor had seen it during his morning visit to the Club, and in his fair-
minded way he had at once insisted on its removal. So the notice had been suppressed;
not, however, before it had achieved its object.
CHAPTER 9
During the next fortnight a great deal happened.
The feud between U Po Kyin and Dr Veraswami was now in full swing. The whole town
was divided into two factions, with every native soul from the magistrates down to the
bazaar sweepers enrolled on one side or the other, and all ready for perjury when the time
came.
But of the two parties, the doctor’s was much the smaller and less efficiently libellous. The editor of the Burmese Patriot had been put on trial for sedition and libel,
bail being refused. His arrest had provoked a small riot in Rangoon, which was
suppressed by the police with the death of only two rioters. In prison the editor went on
hunger strike, but broke down after six hours.
In Kyauktada, too, things had been happening. A dacoit named Nga Shwe O had escaped
from the jail in mysterious circumstances. And there had been a whole crop of rumours
about a projected native rising in the district. The rumours — they were very vague ones
as yet — centred round a village named Thongwa, not far from the camp where Maxwell
was girdling teak. A weiksa, or magician, was said to have appeared from nowhere and to
be prophesying the doom of the English power and distributing magic bullet-proof
jackets. Mr Macgregor did not take the rumours very seriously, but he had asked for an
extra force of Military Police. It was said that a company of Indian infantry with a British
officer in command would be sent to Kyauktada shortly. Westfield, of course, had hurried
to Thongwa at the first threat, or rather hope, of trouble.
‘God, if they’d only break out and rebel properly for once! ’ he said to Ellis before
starting. ‘But it’ll be a bloody washout as usual. Always the same story with these
rebellions — peter out almost before they’ve begun. Would you believe it, I’ve never fired
my gun at a fellow yet, not even a dacoit. Eleven years of it, not counting the War, and
never killed a man. Depressing. ’
‘Oh, well,’ said Ellis, ‘if they won’t come up to the scratch you can always get hold of
the ringleaders and give them a good bambooing on the Q. T. That’s better than coddling
them up in our damned nursing homes of prisons. ’
‘H’m, probably. Can’t do it though, nowadays. All these kid-glove laws — got to keep
them, I suppose, if we’re fools enough to make ‘em. ’
‘Oh, rot the laws. Bambooing’s the only thing that makes any impression on the Burman.
Have you seen them after they’ve been flogged? I have. Brought out of the jail on bullock
carts, yelling, with the women plastering mashed bananas on their backsides. That’s
something they do understand. If I had my way I’d give it ‘em on the soles of the feet the
same as the Turks do. ’
‘Ah well. Let’s hope they’ll have the guts to show a bit of fight for once. Then we’ll call
out the Military Police, rifles and all. Plug a few dozen of ‘em — that’ll clear the air. ’
However, the hoped-for opportunity did not come. Westfield and the dozen constables he
had taken with him to Thongwa — jolly round-faced Gurkha boys, pining to use their
kukris on somebody — found the district depressingly peaceful. There seemed not the
ghost of a rebellion anywhere; only the annual attempt, as regular as the monsoon, of the
villagers to avoid paying the capitation tax.
The weather was growing hotter and hotter. Elizabeth had had her first attack of prickly
heat. Tennis at the Club had practically ceased; people would play one languid set and
then fall into chairs and swallow pints of tepid lime-juice — tepid, because the ice came
only twice weekly from Mandalay and melted within twenty-four hours of arriving. The
Flame of the Forest was in full bloom. The Burmese women, to protect their children
from the sun, streaked their faces with yellow cosmetic until they looked like little
African witch-doctors. Flocks of green pigeons, and imperial pigeons as large as ducks,
came to eat the berries of the big peepul trees along the bazaar road.
Meanwhile, Flory had turned Ma Hla May out of his house.
A nasty, dirty job! There was a sufficient pretext — she had stolen his gold cigarette-case
and pawned it at the house of Li Yeik, the Chinese grocer and illicit pawnbroker in the
bazaar — but still, it was only a pretext. Flory knew perfectly well, and Ma Hla May
knew, and all the servants knew, that he was getting rid of her because of Elizabeth.
Because of ‘the Ingaleikma with dyed hair’, as Ma Hla May called her.
Ma Hla May made no violent scene at first. She stood sullenly listening while he wrote
her a cheque for a hundred rupees — Li Yeik or the Indian chetty in the bazaar would cash
cheques — and told her that she was dismissed. He was more ashamed than she; he could
not look her in the face, and his voice went flat and guilty. When the bullock cart came
for her belongings, he shut himself in the bedroom skulking till the scene should be over.
Cartwheels grated on the drive, there was the sound of men shouting; then suddenly there
was a fearful uproar of screams. Flory went outside. They were all struggling round the
gate in the sunlight. Ma Hla May was clinging to the gatepost and Ko S’la was trying to
bundle her out. She turned a face full of fury and despair towards Flory, screaming over
and over, ‘Thakin! Thakin! Thakin! Thakin! Thakin! ’ It hurt him to the heart that she
should still call him thakin after he had dismissed her.
‘What is it? ’ he said.
It appeared that there was a switch of false hair that Ma Hla May and Ma Yi both
claimed. Flory gave the switch to Ma Yi and gave Ma Hla May two rupees to compensate
her. Then the cart jolted away, with Ma Hla May sitting beside her two wicker baskets,
straight-backed and sullen, and nursing a kitten on her knees. It was only two months
since he had given her the kitten as a present.
Ko STa, who had long wished for Ma Hla May’s removal, was not altogether pleased
now that it had happened. He was even less pleased when he saw his master going to
church — or as he called it, to the ‘English pagoda’ — for Flory was still in Kyauktada on
the Sunday of the padre’s arrival, and he went to church with the others. There was a
congregation of twelve, including Mr Francis, Mr Samuel and six native Christians, with
Mrs Lackersteen playing ‘Abide with Me’ on the tiny harmonium with one game pedal. It
was the first time in ten years that Flory had been to church, except to funerals. Ko S’la’s
notions of what went on in the ‘English pagoda’ were vague in the extreme; but he did
know that church-going signified respectability — a quality which, like all bachelors’
servants, he hated in his bones.
‘There is trouble coming,’ he said despondently to the other servants. ‘I have been
watching him (he meant Flory) these ten days past. He has cut down his cigarettes to
fifteen a day, he has stopped drinking gin before breakfast, he shaves himself every
evening — though he thinks I do not know it, the fool. And he has ordered half a dozen
new silk shirts! I had to stand over the dirzi calling him bahinchut to get them finished in
time. Evil omens! I give him three months longer, and then good-bye to the peace in this
house! ’
‘What, is he going to get married? ’ said Ba Pe.
‘I am certain of it. When a white man begins going to the English pagoda, it is, as you
might say, the beginning of the end. ’
‘I have had many masters in my life,’ old Sammy said. ‘The worst was Colonel Wimpole
sahib, who used to make his orderly hold me down over the table while he came running
from behind and kicked me with very thick boots for serving banana fritters too
frequently. At other times, when he was drunk, he would fire his revolver through the
roof of the servants’ quarters, just above our heads. But I would sooner serve ten years
under Colonel Wimpole sahib than a week under a memsahib with her kit-kit. If our
master marries I shall leave the same day. ’
‘I shall not leave, for I have been his servant fifteen years. But I know what is in store for
us when that woman comes. She will shout at us because of spots of dust on the furniture,
and wake us up to bring cups of tea in the afternoon when we are asleep, and come
poking into the cookhouse at all hours and complain over dirty saucepans and
cockroaches in the flour bin. It is my belief that these women lie awake at nights thinking
of new ways to torment their servants. ’
‘They keep a little red book,’ said Sammy, ‘in which they enter the bazaar-money, two
annas for this, four annas for that, so that a man cannot earn a pice. They make more kit-
kit over the price of an onion than a sahib over five rupees. ’
‘Ah, do I not know it! She will be worse than Ma Hla May. Women! ’ he added
comprehensively, with a kind of sigh.
The sigh was echoed by the others, even by Ma Pu and Ma Yi. Neither took Ko S’la’s
remarks as a stricture upon her own sex, Englishwomen being considered a race apart,
possibly not even human, and so dreadful that an Englishman’s marriage is usually the
signal for the flight of every servant in his house, even those who have been with him for
years.
CHAPTER 10
But as a matter of fact, Ko S’ la’s alarm was premature. After knowing Elizabeth for ten
days, Flory was scarcely more intimate with her than on the day when he had first met
her.
As it happened, he had her almost to himself during these ten days, most of the
Europeans being in the jungle. Flory himself had no right to be loitering in headquarters,
for at this time of year the work of timber-extraction was in full swing, and in his absence
everything went to pieces under the incompetent Eurasian overseer. But he had stayed —
pretext, a touch of fever — while despairing letters came almost every day from the
overseer, telling of disasters. One of the elephants was ill, the engine of the light railway
that was used for carrying teak logs to the river had broken down, fifteen of the coolies
had deserted. But Flory still lingered, unable to tear himself away from Kyauktada while
Elizabeth was there, and continually seeking — never, as yet, to much purpose — to
recapture that easy and delightful friendship of their first meeting.
They met every day, morning and evening, it was true. Each evening they played a single
of tennis at the Club — Mrs Lackersteen was too limp and Mr Lackersteen too liverish for
tennis at this time of year — and afterwards they would sit in the lounge, all four together,
playing bridge and talking. But though Flory spent hours in Elizabeth’s company, and
often they were alone together, he was never for an instant at his ease with her. They
talked — so long as they talked of trivialities — with the utmost freedom, yet they were
distant, like strangers. He felt stiff in her presence, he could not forget his birthmark; his
twice-scraped chin smarted, his body tortured him for whisky and tobacco — for he tried
to cut down his drinking and smoking when he was with her. After ten days they seemed
no nearer the relationship he wanted.
For somehow, he had never been able to talk to her as he longed to talk. To talk, simply
to talk! It sounds so little, and how much it is! When you have existed to the brink of
middle age in bitter loneliness, among people to whom your true opinion on every subject
on earth is blasphemy, the need to talk is the greatest of ah needs. Yet with Elizabeth
serious talk seemed impossible. It was as though there had been a spell upon them that
made ah their conversation lapse into banality; gramophone records, dogs, tennis
racquets — ah that desolating Club-chatter. She seemed not to WANT to talk of anything
but that. He had only to touch upon a subject of any conceivable interest to hear the
evasion, the ‘I shan’t play’, coming into her voice. Her taste in books appalled him when
he discovered it. Yet she was young, he reminded himself, and had she not drunk white
wine and talked of Marcel Proust under the Paris plane trees? Later, no doubt, she would
understand him and give him the companionship he needed. Perhaps it was only that he
had not won her confidence yet.
He was anything but tactful with her. Like all men who have lived much alone, he
adjusted himself better to ideas than to people. And so, though all their talk was
superficial, he began to irritate her sometimes; not by what he said but by what he
implied. There was an uneasiness between them, ill-defined and yet often verging upon
quarrels. When two people, one of whom has lived long in the country while the other is
a newcomer, are thrown together, it is inevitable that the first should act as cicerone to the
second. Elizabeth, during these days, was making her first acquaintance with Burma; it
was Flory, naturally, who acted as her interpreter, explaining this, commenting upon that.
And the things he said, or the way he said them, provoked in her a vague yet deep
disagreement. For she perceived that Flory, when he spoke of the ‘natives’, spoke nearly
always IN FAVOUR of them. He was forever praising Burmese customs and the
Burmese character; he even went so far as to contrast them favourably with the English.
It disquieted her. After all, natives were natives — interesting, no doubt, but finally only a
‘subject’ people, an inferior people with black faces. His attitude was a little TOO
tolerant. Nor had he grasped, yet, in what way he was antagonizing her. He so wanted her
to love Bunna as he loved it, not to look at it with the dull, incurious eyes of a memsahib!
He had forgotten that most people can be at ease in a foreign country only when they are
disparaging the inhabitants.
He was too eager in his attempts to interest her in things Oriental. He tried to induce her,
for instance, to leam Burmese, but it came to nothing. (Her aunt had explained to her that
only missionary-women spoke Burmese; nice women found kitchen Urdu quite as much
as they needed. ) There were countless small disagreements like that. She was grasping,
dimly, that his views were not the views an Englishman should hold. Much more clearly
she grasped that he was asking her to be fond of the Burmese, even to admire them; to
admire people with black faces, almost savages, whose appearance still made her
shudder!
The subject cropped up in a hundred ways. A knot of Burmans would pass them on the
road. She, with her still fresh eyes, would gaze after them, half curious and half repelled;
and she would say to Flory, as she would have said to anybody:
‘How REVOLTINGLY ugly these people are, aren’t they? ’
‘ARE they? I always think they’re rather charming-looking, the Burmese. They have
such splendid bodies! Look at that fellow’s shoulders — like a bronze statue. Just think
what sights you’d see in England if people went about half naked as they do here! ’
‘But they have such hideous-shaped heads! Their skulls kind of slope up behind like a
tom-cat’s. And then the way their foreheads slant back — it makes them look so
WICKED. I remember reading something in a magazine about the shape of people’s
heads; it said that a person with a sloping forehead is a CRIMINAL TYPE. ’
‘Oh, come, that’s a bit sweeping! Round about half the people in the world have that kind
of forehead. ’
‘Oh, well, if you count COLOURED people, of course — ! ’
Or perhaps a string of women would pass, going to the well: heavy-set peasant-girls,
copper-brown, erect under their water-pots with strong marelike buttocks protruded. The
Burmese women repelled Elizabeth more than the men; she felt her kinship with them,
and the hatefulness of being kin to creatures with black faces.
‘Aren’t they too simply dreadful? So COARSE-LOOKING; like some kind of animal.
Do you think ANYONE could think those women attractive? ’
‘Their own men do, I believe. ’
‘I suppose they would. But that black skin — I don’t know how anyone could bear it! ’
‘But, you know, one gets used to the brown skin in time. In fact they say — I believe it’s
true — that after a few years in these countries a brown skin seems more natural than a
white one. And after all, it IS more natural. Take the world as a whole, it’s an eccentricity
to be white. ’
‘You DO have some funny ideas! ’
And so on and so on. She felt all the while an unsatisfactoriness, an unsoundness in the
things he said. It was particularly so on the evening when Flory allowed Mr Francis and
Mr Samuel, the two derelict Eurasians, to entrap him in conversation at the Club gate.
Elizabeth, as it happened, had reached the Club a few minutes before Flory, and when she
heard his voice at the gate she came round the tennis-screen to meet him. The two
Eurasians had sidled up to Flory and cornered him like a pair of dogs asking for a game.
Francis was doing most of the talking. He was a meagre, excitable man, and as brown as
a cigar-leaf, being the son of a South Indian woman; Samuel, whose mother had been a
Karen, was pale yellow with dull red hair. Both were dressed in shabby drill suits, with
vast topis beneath which their slender bodies looked like the stalks of toadstools.
Elizabeth came down the path in time to hear fragments of an enormous and complicated
autobiography. Talking to white men — talking, for choice, about himself — was the great
joy of Francis’s life. When, at intervals of months, he found a European to listen to him,
his life-history would pour out of him in unquenchable torrents. He was talking in a
nasal, sing-song voice of incredible rapidity:
‘Of my father, sir, I remember little, but he was very choleric man and many whackings
with big bamboo stick all knobs on both for self, little half-brother and two mothers. Also
how on occasion of bishop’s visit little half-brother and I dress in longyis and sent among
the Bunnese children to preserve incognito. My father never rose to be bishop, sir. Four
converts only in twenty-eight years, and also too great fondness for Chinese rice-spirit
very fiery noised abroad and spoil sales of my father’s booklet entitled The Scourge of
Alcohol, published with the Rangoon Baptist Press, one rupee eight annas. My little half-
brother die one hot weather, always coughing, coughing,’ etc. , etc.
The two Eurasians perceived the presence of Elizabeth. Both doffed their topis with bows
and brilliant displays of teeth. It was probably several years since either of them had had
a chance of talking to an Englishwoman. Francis burst out more effusively than ever. He
was chattering in evident dread that he would be interrupted and the conversation cut
short.
‘Good evening to you, madam, good evening, good evening! Most honoured to make
your acquaintance, madam!
panniers, according to the ancient Burmese fashion. They were like the petals of a
downward-pointing flower. She threw her cigar languidly to one of the men in the
orchestra, and then, holding out one slender arm, writhed it as though to shake the
muscles loose.
The orchestra burst into a sudden loud squalling. There were pipes like bagpipes, a
strange instrument consisting of plaques of bamboo which a man struck with a little
hammer, and in the middle there was a man surrounded by twelve tall drums of different
sizes. He reached rapidly from one to another, thumping them with the heel of his hand.
In a moment the girl began to dance. But at first it was not a dance, it was a rhythmic
nodding, posturing and twisting of the elbows, like the movements of one of those jointed
wooden figures on an old-fashioned roundabout. The way her neck and elbows rotated
was precisely like a jointed doll, and yet incredibly sinuous. Her hands, twisting like
snakeheads with the fingers close together, could he back until they were almost along
her forearms. By degrees her movements quickened. She began to leap from side to side,
flinging herself down in a kind of curtsy and springing up again with extraordinary
agility, in spite of the long longyi that imprisoned her feet. Then she danced in a
grotesque posture as though sitting down, knees bent, body leaned forward, with her arms
extended and writhing, her head also moving to the beat of the drums. The music
quickened to a climax. The girl rose upright and whirled round as swiftly as a top, the
pannier of her ingyi flying out about her like the petals of a snowdrop. Then the music
stopped as abruptly as it had begun, and the girl sank again into a curtsy, amid raucous
shouting from the audience.
Elizabeth watched the dance with a mixture of amazement, boredom and something
approaching horror. She had sipped her drink and found that it tasted like hair oil. On a
mat by her feet three Burmese girls lay fast asleep with their heads on the same pillow,
their small oval faces side by side like the faces of kittens. Under cover of the music
Flory was speaking in a low voice into Elizabeth’s ear commenting on the dance.
‘I knew this would interest you; that’s why I brought you here. You’ve read books and
been in civilized places, you’re not like the rest of us miserable savages here. Don’t you
think this is worth watching, in its queer way? Just look at that girl’s movements — look
at that strange, bent-forward pose like a marionette, and the way her arms twist from the
elbow like a cobra rising to strike. It’s grotesque, it’s even ugly, with a sort of wilful
ugliness. And there’s something sinister in it too. There’s a touch of the diabolical in all
Mongols. And yet when you look closely, what art, what centuries of culture you can see
behind it! Every movement that girl makes has been studied and handed down through
innumerable generations. Whenever you look closely at the art of these Eastern peoples
you can see that — a civilization stretching back and back, practically the same, into times
when we were dressed in woad. In some way that I can’t define to you, the whole life and
spirit of Burma is summed up in the way that girl twists her arms. When you see her you
can see the rice fields, the villages under the teak trees, the pagodas, the priests in their
yellow robes, the buffaloes swimming the rivers in the early morning, Thibaw’s palace —
His voice stopped abruptly as the music stopped. There were certain things, and a pwe-
dance was one of them, that pricked him to talk discursively and incautiously; but now he
realized that he had only been talking like a character in a novel, and not a very good
novel. He looked away. Elizabeth had listened to him with a chill of discomfort. What
WAS the man talking about? was her first thought. Moreover, she had caught the hated
word Art more than once. For the first time she remembered that Flory was a total
stranger and that it had been unwise to come out with him alone. She looked round her, at
the sea of dark faces and the lurid glare of the lamps; the strangeness of the scene almost
frightened her. What was she doing in this place? Surely it was not right to be sitting
among the black people like this, almost touching them, in the scent of their garlic and
their sweat? Why was she not back at the Club with the other white people? Why had he
brought her here, among this horde of natives, to watch this hideous and savage
spectacle?
The music struck up, and the pwe girl began dancing again. Her face was powdered so
thickly that it gleamed in the lamplight like a chalk mask with live eyes behind it. With
that dead-white oval face and those wooden gestures she was monstrous, like a demon.
The music changed its tempo, and the girl began to sing in a brassy voice. It was a song
with a swift trochaic rhythm, gay yet fierce. The crowd took it up, a hundred voices
chanting the harsh syllables in unison. Still in that strange bent posture the girl turned
round and danced with her buttocks protruded towards the audience. Her silk longyi
gleamed like metal. With hands and elbows still rotating she wagged her posterior from
side to side. Then — astonishing feat, quite visible through the longyi — she began to
wriggle her two buttocks independently in time with the music.
There was a shout of applause from the audience. The three girls asleep on the mat woke
up at the same moment and began clapping their hands wildly. A clerk shouted nasally
‘Bravo! Bravo! ’ in English for the Europeans’ benefit. But U Po Kyin frowned and
waved his hand. He knew all about European women. Elizabeth, however, had already
stood up.
‘I’m going. It’s time we were back,’ she said abruptly. She was looking away, but Flory
could see that her face was pink.
He stood up beside her, dismayed. ‘But, I say! Couldn’t you stay a few minutes longer? I
know it’s late, but — they brought this girl on two hours before she was due, in our
honour. Just a few minutes? ’
‘I can’t help it, I ought to have been back ages ago. I don’t know WHAT my uncle and
aunt will be thinking. ’
She began at once to pick her way through the crowd, and he followed her, with not even
time to thank the pwe people for their trouble. The Burmans made way with a sulky air.
How like these English people, to upset everything by sending for the best dancer and
then go away almost before she had started! There was a fearful row as soon as Flory and
Elizabeth had gone, the pwe girl refusing to go on with her dance and the audience
demanding that she should continue. However, peace was restored when two clowns
hurried on to the stage and began letting off crackers and making obscene jokes.
Flory followed the girl abjectly up the road. She was walking quickly, her head turned
away, and for some moments she would not speak. What a thing to happen, when they
had been getting on so well together! He kept trying to apologize.
‘I’m so sorry! I’d no idea you’d mind — ’
‘It’s nothing. What is there to be sorry about? I only said it was time to go back, that’s
all. ’
‘I ought to have thought. One gets not to notice that kind of thing in this country. These
people’s sense of decency isn’t the same as ours — it’s stricter in some ways — but — ’
‘It’s not that! It’s not that! ’ she exclaimed quite angrily.
He saw that he was only making it worse. They walked on in silence, he behind. He was
miserable. What a bloody fool he had been! And yet all the while he had no inkling of the
real reason why she was angry with him. It was not the pwe girl’s behaviour, in itself,
that had offended her; it had only brought things to a head. But the whole expedition —
the very notion of WANTING to rub shoulders with all those smelly natives — had
impressed her badly. She was perfectly certain that that was not how white men ought to
behave. And that extraordinary rambling speech that he had begun, with all those long
words — almost, she thought bitterly, as though he were quoting poetry! It was how those
beastly artists that you met sometimes in Paris used to talk. She had thought him a manly
man till this evening. Then her mind went back to the morning’s adventure, and how he
had faced the buffalo barehanded, and some of her anger evaporated. By the time they
reached the Club gate she felt inclined to forgive him. Flory had by now plucked up
courage to speak again. He stopped, and she stopped too, in a patch where the boughs let
through some starlight and he could see her face dimly.
‘I say. I say, I do hope you’re not really angry about this? ’
‘No, of course I’m not. I told you I wasn’t. ’
‘I oughtn’t to have taken you there. Please forgive me. Do you know, I don’t think I’d tell
the others where you’ve been. Perhaps it would be better to say you’ve just been out for a
stroll, out in the garden — something like that. They might think it queer, a white girl
going to a pwe. I don’t think I’d tell them. ’
‘Oh, of course I won’t! ’ she agreed with a wannness that surprised him. After that he
knew that he was forgiven. But what it was that he was forgiven, he had not yet grasped.
They went into the Club separately, by tacit consent. The expedition had been a failure,
decidedly. There was a gala air about the Club lounge tonight. The entire European
community were waiting to greet Elizabeth, and the butler and the six chokras, in their
best starched white suits, were drawn up on either side of the door, smiling and
salaaming. When the Europeans had finished their greetings the butler came forward with
a vast garland of flowers that the servants had prepared for the ‘missiesahib’. Mr
Macgregor made a very humorous speech of welcome, introducing everybody. He
introduced Maxwell as ‘our local arboreal specialist’, Westfield as ‘the guardian of law
and order and — ah — terror of the local banditti’, and so on and so forth. There was much
laughter. The sight of a pretty girl’s face had put everyone in such a good humour that
they could even enjoy Mr Macgregor’ s speech — which, to tell the truth, he had spent
most of the evening in preparing.
At the first possible moment Ellis, with a sly air, took Flory and Westfield by the arm and
drew them away into the card-room. He was in a much better mood than usual. He
pinched Flory’s arm with his small, hard fingers, painfully but quite amiably.
‘Well, my lad, everyone’s been looking for you. Where have you been all this time? ’
‘Oh, only for a stroll. ’
‘For a stroll! And who with? ’
‘With Miss Lackersteen. ’
‘I knew it! So YOU’RE the bloody fool who’s fallen into the trap, are you? YOU
swallowed the bait before anyone else had time to look at it. I thought you were too old a
bird for that, by God I did! ’
‘What do you mean? ’
‘Mean! Look at him pretending he doesn’t know what I mean! Why, I mean that Ma
Lackersteen’s marked you down for her beloved nephew-in-law, of course. That is, if you
aren’t bloody careful. Eh, Westfield? ’
‘Quite right, ol’ boy. Eligible young bachelor. Marriage halter and all that. They’ve got
their eye on him. ’
‘I don’t know where you’re getting this idea from. The girl’s hardly been here twenty-
four hours. ’
‘Long enough for you to take her up the garden path, anyway. You watch your step. Tom
Lackersteen may be a drunken sot, but he’s not such a bloody fool that he wants a niece
hanging round his neck for the rest of his life. And of course SHE knows which side her
bread’s buttered. So you take care and don’t go putting your head into the noose. ’
‘Damn it, you’ve no right to talk about people like that. After all, the girl’s only a kid — ’
‘My dear old ass’ — Ellis, almost affectionate now that he had a new subject for scandal,
took Flory by the coat lapel — ‘my dear, dear old ass, don’t you go filling yourself up with
moonshine. You think that girl’s easy fruit: she’s not. These girls out from home are all
the same. “Anything in trousers but nothing this side the altar” — that’s their motto, every
one of them. Why do you think the girl’s come out here? ’
‘Why? I don’t know. Because she wanted to, I suppose. ’
‘My good fool! She come out to lay her claws into a husband, of course. As if it wasn’t
well known! When a girl’s failed everywhere else she tries India, where every man’s
pining for the sight of a white woman. The Indian marriage-market, they call it. Meat
market it ought to be. Shiploads of ‘em coming out every year like carcasses of frozen
mutton, to be pawed over by nasty old bachelors like you. Cold storage. Juicy joints
straight from the ice. ’
‘You do say some repulsive things. ’
‘Best pasture-fed English meat,’ said Ellis with a pleased air. ‘Fresh consignments.
Warranted prime condition. ’
He went through a pantomime of examining a joint of meat, with goatish sniffs. This joke
was likely to last Ellis a long time; his jokes usually did; and there was nothing that gave
him quite so keen a pleasure as dragging a woman’s name through mud.
Flory did not see much more of Elizabeth that evening. Everyone was in the lounge
together, and there was the silly clattering chatter about nothing that there is on these
occasions. Flory could never keep up that kind of conversation for long. But as for
Elizabeth, the civilized atmosphere of the Club, with the white faces all round her and the
friendly look of the illustrated papers and the ‘Bonzo’ pictures, reassured her after that
doubtful interlude at the pwe.
When the Lackersteens left the Club at nine, it was not Flory but Mr Macgregor who
walked home with them, ambling beside Elizabeth like some friendly saurian monster,
among the faint crooked shadows of the gold mohur stems. The Prome anecdote, and
many another, found a new home. Any newcomer to Kyauktada was apt to come in for
rather a large share of Mr Macgregor’ s conversation, for the others looked on him as an
unparalleled bore, and it was a tradition at the Club to interrupt his stories. But Elizabeth
was by nature a good listener. Mr Macgregor thought he had seldom met so intelligent a
girl.
Flory stayed a little longer at the Club, drinking with the others. There was much smutty
talk about Elizabeth. The quarrel about Dr Veraswami’s election had been shelved for the
time being. Also, the notice that Ellis had put up on the previous evening had been taken
down. Mr Macgregor had seen it during his morning visit to the Club, and in his fair-
minded way he had at once insisted on its removal. So the notice had been suppressed;
not, however, before it had achieved its object.
CHAPTER 9
During the next fortnight a great deal happened.
The feud between U Po Kyin and Dr Veraswami was now in full swing. The whole town
was divided into two factions, with every native soul from the magistrates down to the
bazaar sweepers enrolled on one side or the other, and all ready for perjury when the time
came.
But of the two parties, the doctor’s was much the smaller and less efficiently libellous. The editor of the Burmese Patriot had been put on trial for sedition and libel,
bail being refused. His arrest had provoked a small riot in Rangoon, which was
suppressed by the police with the death of only two rioters. In prison the editor went on
hunger strike, but broke down after six hours.
In Kyauktada, too, things had been happening. A dacoit named Nga Shwe O had escaped
from the jail in mysterious circumstances. And there had been a whole crop of rumours
about a projected native rising in the district. The rumours — they were very vague ones
as yet — centred round a village named Thongwa, not far from the camp where Maxwell
was girdling teak. A weiksa, or magician, was said to have appeared from nowhere and to
be prophesying the doom of the English power and distributing magic bullet-proof
jackets. Mr Macgregor did not take the rumours very seriously, but he had asked for an
extra force of Military Police. It was said that a company of Indian infantry with a British
officer in command would be sent to Kyauktada shortly. Westfield, of course, had hurried
to Thongwa at the first threat, or rather hope, of trouble.
‘God, if they’d only break out and rebel properly for once! ’ he said to Ellis before
starting. ‘But it’ll be a bloody washout as usual. Always the same story with these
rebellions — peter out almost before they’ve begun. Would you believe it, I’ve never fired
my gun at a fellow yet, not even a dacoit. Eleven years of it, not counting the War, and
never killed a man. Depressing. ’
‘Oh, well,’ said Ellis, ‘if they won’t come up to the scratch you can always get hold of
the ringleaders and give them a good bambooing on the Q. T. That’s better than coddling
them up in our damned nursing homes of prisons. ’
‘H’m, probably. Can’t do it though, nowadays. All these kid-glove laws — got to keep
them, I suppose, if we’re fools enough to make ‘em. ’
‘Oh, rot the laws. Bambooing’s the only thing that makes any impression on the Burman.
Have you seen them after they’ve been flogged? I have. Brought out of the jail on bullock
carts, yelling, with the women plastering mashed bananas on their backsides. That’s
something they do understand. If I had my way I’d give it ‘em on the soles of the feet the
same as the Turks do. ’
‘Ah well. Let’s hope they’ll have the guts to show a bit of fight for once. Then we’ll call
out the Military Police, rifles and all. Plug a few dozen of ‘em — that’ll clear the air. ’
However, the hoped-for opportunity did not come. Westfield and the dozen constables he
had taken with him to Thongwa — jolly round-faced Gurkha boys, pining to use their
kukris on somebody — found the district depressingly peaceful. There seemed not the
ghost of a rebellion anywhere; only the annual attempt, as regular as the monsoon, of the
villagers to avoid paying the capitation tax.
The weather was growing hotter and hotter. Elizabeth had had her first attack of prickly
heat. Tennis at the Club had practically ceased; people would play one languid set and
then fall into chairs and swallow pints of tepid lime-juice — tepid, because the ice came
only twice weekly from Mandalay and melted within twenty-four hours of arriving. The
Flame of the Forest was in full bloom. The Burmese women, to protect their children
from the sun, streaked their faces with yellow cosmetic until they looked like little
African witch-doctors. Flocks of green pigeons, and imperial pigeons as large as ducks,
came to eat the berries of the big peepul trees along the bazaar road.
Meanwhile, Flory had turned Ma Hla May out of his house.
A nasty, dirty job! There was a sufficient pretext — she had stolen his gold cigarette-case
and pawned it at the house of Li Yeik, the Chinese grocer and illicit pawnbroker in the
bazaar — but still, it was only a pretext. Flory knew perfectly well, and Ma Hla May
knew, and all the servants knew, that he was getting rid of her because of Elizabeth.
Because of ‘the Ingaleikma with dyed hair’, as Ma Hla May called her.
Ma Hla May made no violent scene at first. She stood sullenly listening while he wrote
her a cheque for a hundred rupees — Li Yeik or the Indian chetty in the bazaar would cash
cheques — and told her that she was dismissed. He was more ashamed than she; he could
not look her in the face, and his voice went flat and guilty. When the bullock cart came
for her belongings, he shut himself in the bedroom skulking till the scene should be over.
Cartwheels grated on the drive, there was the sound of men shouting; then suddenly there
was a fearful uproar of screams. Flory went outside. They were all struggling round the
gate in the sunlight. Ma Hla May was clinging to the gatepost and Ko S’la was trying to
bundle her out. She turned a face full of fury and despair towards Flory, screaming over
and over, ‘Thakin! Thakin! Thakin! Thakin! Thakin! ’ It hurt him to the heart that she
should still call him thakin after he had dismissed her.
‘What is it? ’ he said.
It appeared that there was a switch of false hair that Ma Hla May and Ma Yi both
claimed. Flory gave the switch to Ma Yi and gave Ma Hla May two rupees to compensate
her. Then the cart jolted away, with Ma Hla May sitting beside her two wicker baskets,
straight-backed and sullen, and nursing a kitten on her knees. It was only two months
since he had given her the kitten as a present.
Ko STa, who had long wished for Ma Hla May’s removal, was not altogether pleased
now that it had happened. He was even less pleased when he saw his master going to
church — or as he called it, to the ‘English pagoda’ — for Flory was still in Kyauktada on
the Sunday of the padre’s arrival, and he went to church with the others. There was a
congregation of twelve, including Mr Francis, Mr Samuel and six native Christians, with
Mrs Lackersteen playing ‘Abide with Me’ on the tiny harmonium with one game pedal. It
was the first time in ten years that Flory had been to church, except to funerals. Ko S’la’s
notions of what went on in the ‘English pagoda’ were vague in the extreme; but he did
know that church-going signified respectability — a quality which, like all bachelors’
servants, he hated in his bones.
‘There is trouble coming,’ he said despondently to the other servants. ‘I have been
watching him (he meant Flory) these ten days past. He has cut down his cigarettes to
fifteen a day, he has stopped drinking gin before breakfast, he shaves himself every
evening — though he thinks I do not know it, the fool. And he has ordered half a dozen
new silk shirts! I had to stand over the dirzi calling him bahinchut to get them finished in
time. Evil omens! I give him three months longer, and then good-bye to the peace in this
house! ’
‘What, is he going to get married? ’ said Ba Pe.
‘I am certain of it. When a white man begins going to the English pagoda, it is, as you
might say, the beginning of the end. ’
‘I have had many masters in my life,’ old Sammy said. ‘The worst was Colonel Wimpole
sahib, who used to make his orderly hold me down over the table while he came running
from behind and kicked me with very thick boots for serving banana fritters too
frequently. At other times, when he was drunk, he would fire his revolver through the
roof of the servants’ quarters, just above our heads. But I would sooner serve ten years
under Colonel Wimpole sahib than a week under a memsahib with her kit-kit. If our
master marries I shall leave the same day. ’
‘I shall not leave, for I have been his servant fifteen years. But I know what is in store for
us when that woman comes. She will shout at us because of spots of dust on the furniture,
and wake us up to bring cups of tea in the afternoon when we are asleep, and come
poking into the cookhouse at all hours and complain over dirty saucepans and
cockroaches in the flour bin. It is my belief that these women lie awake at nights thinking
of new ways to torment their servants. ’
‘They keep a little red book,’ said Sammy, ‘in which they enter the bazaar-money, two
annas for this, four annas for that, so that a man cannot earn a pice. They make more kit-
kit over the price of an onion than a sahib over five rupees. ’
‘Ah, do I not know it! She will be worse than Ma Hla May. Women! ’ he added
comprehensively, with a kind of sigh.
The sigh was echoed by the others, even by Ma Pu and Ma Yi. Neither took Ko S’la’s
remarks as a stricture upon her own sex, Englishwomen being considered a race apart,
possibly not even human, and so dreadful that an Englishman’s marriage is usually the
signal for the flight of every servant in his house, even those who have been with him for
years.
CHAPTER 10
But as a matter of fact, Ko S’ la’s alarm was premature. After knowing Elizabeth for ten
days, Flory was scarcely more intimate with her than on the day when he had first met
her.
As it happened, he had her almost to himself during these ten days, most of the
Europeans being in the jungle. Flory himself had no right to be loitering in headquarters,
for at this time of year the work of timber-extraction was in full swing, and in his absence
everything went to pieces under the incompetent Eurasian overseer. But he had stayed —
pretext, a touch of fever — while despairing letters came almost every day from the
overseer, telling of disasters. One of the elephants was ill, the engine of the light railway
that was used for carrying teak logs to the river had broken down, fifteen of the coolies
had deserted. But Flory still lingered, unable to tear himself away from Kyauktada while
Elizabeth was there, and continually seeking — never, as yet, to much purpose — to
recapture that easy and delightful friendship of their first meeting.
They met every day, morning and evening, it was true. Each evening they played a single
of tennis at the Club — Mrs Lackersteen was too limp and Mr Lackersteen too liverish for
tennis at this time of year — and afterwards they would sit in the lounge, all four together,
playing bridge and talking. But though Flory spent hours in Elizabeth’s company, and
often they were alone together, he was never for an instant at his ease with her. They
talked — so long as they talked of trivialities — with the utmost freedom, yet they were
distant, like strangers. He felt stiff in her presence, he could not forget his birthmark; his
twice-scraped chin smarted, his body tortured him for whisky and tobacco — for he tried
to cut down his drinking and smoking when he was with her. After ten days they seemed
no nearer the relationship he wanted.
For somehow, he had never been able to talk to her as he longed to talk. To talk, simply
to talk! It sounds so little, and how much it is! When you have existed to the brink of
middle age in bitter loneliness, among people to whom your true opinion on every subject
on earth is blasphemy, the need to talk is the greatest of ah needs. Yet with Elizabeth
serious talk seemed impossible. It was as though there had been a spell upon them that
made ah their conversation lapse into banality; gramophone records, dogs, tennis
racquets — ah that desolating Club-chatter. She seemed not to WANT to talk of anything
but that. He had only to touch upon a subject of any conceivable interest to hear the
evasion, the ‘I shan’t play’, coming into her voice. Her taste in books appalled him when
he discovered it. Yet she was young, he reminded himself, and had she not drunk white
wine and talked of Marcel Proust under the Paris plane trees? Later, no doubt, she would
understand him and give him the companionship he needed. Perhaps it was only that he
had not won her confidence yet.
He was anything but tactful with her. Like all men who have lived much alone, he
adjusted himself better to ideas than to people. And so, though all their talk was
superficial, he began to irritate her sometimes; not by what he said but by what he
implied. There was an uneasiness between them, ill-defined and yet often verging upon
quarrels. When two people, one of whom has lived long in the country while the other is
a newcomer, are thrown together, it is inevitable that the first should act as cicerone to the
second. Elizabeth, during these days, was making her first acquaintance with Burma; it
was Flory, naturally, who acted as her interpreter, explaining this, commenting upon that.
And the things he said, or the way he said them, provoked in her a vague yet deep
disagreement. For she perceived that Flory, when he spoke of the ‘natives’, spoke nearly
always IN FAVOUR of them. He was forever praising Burmese customs and the
Burmese character; he even went so far as to contrast them favourably with the English.
It disquieted her. After all, natives were natives — interesting, no doubt, but finally only a
‘subject’ people, an inferior people with black faces. His attitude was a little TOO
tolerant. Nor had he grasped, yet, in what way he was antagonizing her. He so wanted her
to love Bunna as he loved it, not to look at it with the dull, incurious eyes of a memsahib!
He had forgotten that most people can be at ease in a foreign country only when they are
disparaging the inhabitants.
He was too eager in his attempts to interest her in things Oriental. He tried to induce her,
for instance, to leam Burmese, but it came to nothing. (Her aunt had explained to her that
only missionary-women spoke Burmese; nice women found kitchen Urdu quite as much
as they needed. ) There were countless small disagreements like that. She was grasping,
dimly, that his views were not the views an Englishman should hold. Much more clearly
she grasped that he was asking her to be fond of the Burmese, even to admire them; to
admire people with black faces, almost savages, whose appearance still made her
shudder!
The subject cropped up in a hundred ways. A knot of Burmans would pass them on the
road. She, with her still fresh eyes, would gaze after them, half curious and half repelled;
and she would say to Flory, as she would have said to anybody:
‘How REVOLTINGLY ugly these people are, aren’t they? ’
‘ARE they? I always think they’re rather charming-looking, the Burmese. They have
such splendid bodies! Look at that fellow’s shoulders — like a bronze statue. Just think
what sights you’d see in England if people went about half naked as they do here! ’
‘But they have such hideous-shaped heads! Their skulls kind of slope up behind like a
tom-cat’s. And then the way their foreheads slant back — it makes them look so
WICKED. I remember reading something in a magazine about the shape of people’s
heads; it said that a person with a sloping forehead is a CRIMINAL TYPE. ’
‘Oh, come, that’s a bit sweeping! Round about half the people in the world have that kind
of forehead. ’
‘Oh, well, if you count COLOURED people, of course — ! ’
Or perhaps a string of women would pass, going to the well: heavy-set peasant-girls,
copper-brown, erect under their water-pots with strong marelike buttocks protruded. The
Burmese women repelled Elizabeth more than the men; she felt her kinship with them,
and the hatefulness of being kin to creatures with black faces.
‘Aren’t they too simply dreadful? So COARSE-LOOKING; like some kind of animal.
Do you think ANYONE could think those women attractive? ’
‘Their own men do, I believe. ’
‘I suppose they would. But that black skin — I don’t know how anyone could bear it! ’
‘But, you know, one gets used to the brown skin in time. In fact they say — I believe it’s
true — that after a few years in these countries a brown skin seems more natural than a
white one. And after all, it IS more natural. Take the world as a whole, it’s an eccentricity
to be white. ’
‘You DO have some funny ideas! ’
And so on and so on. She felt all the while an unsatisfactoriness, an unsoundness in the
things he said. It was particularly so on the evening when Flory allowed Mr Francis and
Mr Samuel, the two derelict Eurasians, to entrap him in conversation at the Club gate.
Elizabeth, as it happened, had reached the Club a few minutes before Flory, and when she
heard his voice at the gate she came round the tennis-screen to meet him. The two
Eurasians had sidled up to Flory and cornered him like a pair of dogs asking for a game.
Francis was doing most of the talking. He was a meagre, excitable man, and as brown as
a cigar-leaf, being the son of a South Indian woman; Samuel, whose mother had been a
Karen, was pale yellow with dull red hair. Both were dressed in shabby drill suits, with
vast topis beneath which their slender bodies looked like the stalks of toadstools.
Elizabeth came down the path in time to hear fragments of an enormous and complicated
autobiography. Talking to white men — talking, for choice, about himself — was the great
joy of Francis’s life. When, at intervals of months, he found a European to listen to him,
his life-history would pour out of him in unquenchable torrents. He was talking in a
nasal, sing-song voice of incredible rapidity:
‘Of my father, sir, I remember little, but he was very choleric man and many whackings
with big bamboo stick all knobs on both for self, little half-brother and two mothers. Also
how on occasion of bishop’s visit little half-brother and I dress in longyis and sent among
the Bunnese children to preserve incognito. My father never rose to be bishop, sir. Four
converts only in twenty-eight years, and also too great fondness for Chinese rice-spirit
very fiery noised abroad and spoil sales of my father’s booklet entitled The Scourge of
Alcohol, published with the Rangoon Baptist Press, one rupee eight annas. My little half-
brother die one hot weather, always coughing, coughing,’ etc. , etc.
The two Eurasians perceived the presence of Elizabeth. Both doffed their topis with bows
and brilliant displays of teeth. It was probably several years since either of them had had
a chance of talking to an Englishwoman. Francis burst out more effusively than ever. He
was chattering in evident dread that he would be interrupted and the conversation cut
short.
‘Good evening to you, madam, good evening, good evening! Most honoured to make
your acquaintance, madam!
